Fyodor Dostoevsky The Grand Inquisitor

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“The Grand Inquisitor” is a chapter in The Brothers Karamazov by Russian philosopher Fyodor Dostoevsky. In this chapter, the Grand Inquisitor delivers an argument against Jesus for allowing free will and thus suffering to cause damage to humanity. Arguing “that peace of mind and even death are dearer to man than free choice and the cognition of good and evil” (Dostoevsky), the Grand Inquisitor asserts that the burden of moral responsibility causes a great deal of suffering and because of this suffering, Jesus was wrong to choose free will of humanity over collective happiness. The Grand Inquisitor makes several problematic assumptions about the nature of humans and morality. The central claim of the Grand Inquisitor is that when Christ was